A novel rod-like porous carbon with ordered hierarchical pore structure prepared from Al-based metal-organic framework without template as greatly enhanced performance for supercapacitor

The present paper proposes a novel and facile method for the preparation of hierarchical porous rod-like carbon which is derived from aluminum-based metal organic frameworks. This carbon is prepared by carbonization and activation with KOH and KNO3 of Al precursor which is obtained by the reaction of sodium 1,3,5-benzenetricarboxylate (Na3BTC) and aluminum chloride hexahydrate (AlCl3.6H2O) as raw reactants without template in a mixed ethanol-methanol solution at room temperature. The optimized porous carbon has a large surface area (1886 m2 g−1), a large pore volume (1.29 cm3 g−1) and a uniform pore diameter (4.25 nm). The carbon with the mentioned superior structure provides excellent electrochemical properties with long-term reliability, high specific capacitance (345 F g−1 at 1 mV s−1 and 332 F g−1 at 1 A g−1, respectively), ultrahigh charge-discharge speed of 1s at 550 mV s−1, and super-long cycle life over 100, 000 cycles at 100 A g−1 with very low decay rate of 2.2%. The carbon will be a competitive and promising active material for next generation electrode material of power supercapacitors.